Causality, Interpretation, and the Mind

Abstract

Abstract Explores the relation between interpretationism and causal theories in the philosophy of mind. Interpretationism is the view that we can understand the nature of the propositional attitudes by reflecting on the process of interpretation—the process of ascribing attitudes to a subject on the basis of what she says and does. Causal theories say that the concepts of common‐sense psychology—concepts such as action, perception, and memory—are essentially causal. Interpretationism and causal theories are sometimes combined, notably in the work of Donald Davidson. But it is often thought that they are incompatible—that interpretationism makes it impossible for mental phenomena to play genuinely causal roles. The book defends interpretationism as an approach to the propositional attitudes; it defends causal theories of action‐explanation and vision; and it explains how these two approaches are compatible. Different versions of interpretationism are distinguished and assessed. The relations between the mental and the physical are discussed; the anomalism of the mental is traced to the uncodifiability of rationality and its implications are explored. A disjunctive conception of visual experience is supported and combined with a causal theory of vision. And the explanatory relevance of mental properties is defended against those who hold that non‐reductive monism in general, and anomalous monism in particular, cannot satisfactorily accommodate the causal role of the mental.

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